Roger Ebert on Where the New Oscar Rules Go Wrong

The Motion Picture Academy has just emerged from another of its throes of rewriting the ground rules involving feature-length documentaries. At stake is a nomination for an Oscar, which can be invaluable. Most new documentaries, even those widely discussed, don’t play in many cities or perhaps even states. An Oscar means more playdates, better business On Demand, and a longer shelf life on video. At a time when new technology makes it inexpensive to produce a good-looking doc, the struggle to stand out from the crowd is more desperate than ever.

There is no flawless way for the Academy’s Documentary Branch to screen all the hopefuls. Volunteer groups were assigned to thin out the finalists, leading to scandal when it was learned that sometimes they would agree to turn off a movie early. It leaked out that “Hoop Dreams,” one the greatest American documentaries ever made, failed to be nominated because the screening was ended after 15 minutes. That inspired a reform of the rules, and now we have a reform of the reform.

When I read the first summary of the new rules, what jumped out at me was that, to be eligible, a documentary had to be reviewed by either the Los Angeles Times or the New York Times. That puts enormous pressure on the critics of those papers (“Review my doc or I’ll shoot this dog”), but to qualify at all, a documentary must open and play for at least a week in both cities, so it’s fairly likely to be reviewed.

In defining a one-week run, however, the rules grow almost comical. I quote: “The motion picture must be exhibited for paid admission, and must be advertised during each of its runs in major newspapers: The New York Times, Time Out New York or The Village Voice (New York); Los Angeles Times or LA Weekly (Los Angeles). Advertisements must have minimum dimensions of one inch by two inches and must include the theater, film title and the dates and screening times of the qualifying exhibitions.” The Academy mercifully doesn’t specify type fonts.

The problem is that the Academy fails to take into account non-theatrical venues that reach enormously larger audiences than those two proverbial New York and Los Angeles theaters. This afternoon I’m viewing a DVD of “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” the third of the documentaries about the West Memphis Three by Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky. Their first two films were instrumental in questioning the life sentences handed down in that case, and now the Three have been granted their freedom. The film was financed by Home Box Office, which will premiere it Thursday at 9 p.m. ET. Hoping for a nomination, HBO opened the film for a week in each city, but neither paper reviewed it, possibly because (if my editors in Chicago are anything like those on the coasts) “it’s gonna play on HBO and that’s when our readers will want to read about it.”

Nevertheless, the revised rules of the Documentary Branch are an improvement, argues Michael Moore, who with Errol Morris and Ken Burns is one of the few documentarians most people have heard of. That’s because it replaces a labyrinthine system of rounds of weighted voting, in which most of the volunteers didn’t see most of the films. What’s now in place in a two-stage preferential vote involving all 157 members of the Branch. That seems more fair to the finalists, but if your film premiered on cable, you’re plumb out of luck.

The Academy is going through agonies in dealing with the phenomenon of On Demand. Some studios want to premiere new features on Pay TV on the same day they open in theaters. Most exhibitors raise holy hell at that prospect. Yet big screen TV sets grow steadily cheaper. Watching movies on them grows easier; a nifty device called the Roku Player will feed a HD-quality signal to your TV, and so will most video game boxes. Netflix, Hulu, iTunes, vudu, Amazon and other internet highways bring countless movies, even new ones, to consumers. Netflix alone accounts for 20% of all U.S. internet traffic in the evening. You read stories about the declining American box office, but we’re possibly watching more movies than ever before.

The Academy’s work on its rules is obviously not finished. I have no handy suggestions for them. What’s needed is some sort of system to filter new documentaries down to a number that can be fairly evaluated. I’ve seen a photo of DVDs submitted to the 2012 Sundance Film Festival. Too many for one lifetime. They parcel them out among volunteers. At the end of the day it all comes down to somebody’s dreams and somebody else’s eyeballs.

Roger Ebert is the Pulitzer Prize-winning film critic for The Chicago Sun-Times. He is the author of a memoir, “Life Itself,” recently published by Grand Central. His website is here.

What do you think? Did Oscar get it right or wrong? Leave your thoughts in the comments.